NAFTA, where has all Japans radiation gone?

MIRMC a collection of nuclear and health related professionals that have access to a spectrometer have been double checking food contamination.. Their findings concur generally with Greenpeace findings they say!

And here is a falsified report that was leaked to the alternative media that blamed contamination on American grown Pistachios. Greenpeace may have done a deal with the supermarkets to check for radiation in their products. According to this report the supermarkets are just falsifying the data with old measurement reports. The sell buy date of the can of pistachios is 2001 and the test must have been before then..

(the comments show the possible links to who might have been involved and Aeons involvement with Greenpeace and a hint at manipulation of the alternative media by Ogilvy and Mather and their affiliates)

However, I think Greenpeace have been helping residents test for radiation in the food too I presume, though they have not been very public about it, nor have they released any reports since December 2011 on japan as far as I am aware.

As Greenpeace and everyone are looking for the contaminated food and not finding it, I thought I might have a look around to see where it might have gone to?

More below.

This diagram hints at the likely corporations that will be processing the cesium 137, 134, strontium 90 etc

And here is a pdf showing Japanese exports in 2009

mainly grains and seafood exports though here.. the other term is “dairy and eggs”

If you download the June excel file you will see that the USA imports from Japan under the guise of NAFTA

NAFTA is the largest importer from japan over the last year with the USA following closely

And in the Monthly Report of Recent Economic and Financial Developments July 2012, there is some interesting data on import and export and how the economy is booming.. this pdf link was hidden from other Japanese website link (the link showed a 404 error) i traced it through a google search of keywords

in this version of export data does not show NAFTA as a big sharer in the exports from japan section as did the other import export pdf i came across. but it does show the usa having double the amount than the export data link above

As an aside,and so as not to ignore the banking sector (fair and balanced) here are some Interesting figures concerning the bank of japan in connection to LIBOR (chart 34)

So, the Japanese economy has been holding its own generally and the corporate profits are well up and showing no sign of wear and tear. The goods head toward USA/NAFTA. Then the ingredients are mixed down by large food corporations and then become USA/NAFTA produce. The products can then go worldwide. Australia as an example has a trade agreement with the USA and in the last ten years has seen imports from the USA/NAFTA rise. And of course the USA exports to most countries with similar agreements

Report on Australia Free Trade Agreement

The chapter also reminds the two countries that they must abide by the WTO rules applying what is called national treatment. “National treatment” means that each country will provide the same treatment to imported goods from the other country as if they were domestically produced goods.

[….]

Rules of origin

For the purposes of the FTA, this section defines an originating good as those that:

are wholly obtained or produced entirely in the country, such as minerals extracted there, vegetable goods harvested there, and live animals born and raised there;

are produced in the country wholly from originating materials; or

are produced in the country partly from non-originating materials.

[…]

The section also outlines supporting documentation and verifications that the goods being traded are, indeed, originating in the exporting country, as defined by the agreement.

[…]

Sanitary and phytosanitary measures

In conjunction with the existing WTO Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement, this section sets up two committees to ensure that the SPS agreement provisions are followed.

Committee on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Matters- provided with a mandate for “increasing the mutual understanding of the SPS measures and regulatory processes of each Party as well as continuing the cooperative efforts of the Parties internationally.”

Standing Working Group on Animal and Plant Health- to help with the resolution of specific animal and plant health matters with the goal of resolving the problems with the least adverse effect on trade as possible.

[….]

Competition-related matters

The parties agreed to minimise obstacles to the operation of each others’ competition and consumer protection policies.

[…]

Economic benefits

The government relied on estimates of the economic benefits of the FTA computed by the Centre for International Economics, a consultancy group.

[…]

Outcomes

According to Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade figures the imbalance in trade between the U.S. and Australia increased substantially during 2007. The United States became Australia’s largest import source, with goods and services imported to a value of over A$31 billion. Australia’s exports to the U.S., however, amounted to only $15.8 billion AU.[14] It remains unclear what, if any, real benefits the agreement has produced.

Originally posted by The Citizens Trade Campaign, of which USAS is a member

– Food and Product Safety.

NAFTA, CAFTA and past FTAs contain language requiring the United States to accept imported food that does not meet our domestic safety standards and limiting import inspection of food and products. In all future U.S. trade pacts, the right to send food and products into the United States must be conditioned on meeting U.S. safety and inspection standards

[…]

– Agriculture Provisions

…………………..Failure to establish new agriculture terms would intensify the race to the bottom in commodity prices, pitting farmer against farmer and nation against nation to see who can produce food the cheapest, regardless of labor, environment or food-safety standards.

[…]

– Service-sector deregulation.

Future U.S. trade pacts must not limit domestic policy regarding the regulation of health, energy, and other essential services. As well, the financial crisis has shown the perils of locking in deregulation of banking, insurance, and other financial services, as has occurred in past pacts.

The past FTAs’ investor rights terms create incentives for U.S. firms to offshore their U.S. production to foreign jurisdictions where they can operate under privileged FTA foreign investor status rather than be forced to deal with that country’s regulatory policy and courts. They also subject our domestic environmental, zoning, health and other public interest policies to challenge by foreign investors in foreign tribunals.

And this breaking story, positing that rice prices now remained stable.

Barclays accused of making £500m out of hunger after speculating on global food prices

By ANNA EDWARDS

PUBLISHED: 12:26, 1 September

[…]

Investors accused of using food market ‘as a playground’

Bank accused of risking creating a ‘speculative bubble’

UK food prices have ‘soared by 37.9 per cent in one year’

[…]

Barclays was unavailable to respond to accusations that speculation pushed up prices when the MailOnline went to press.

The World Bank published their Food Price Index, revealing worrying figures that global food prices have increased by 8 per cent in the last four months since December 2011, and in March 2012 were only 6 per cent below their February 2011 historical peak.

All key food prices have increased, except for rice.

The WMD highlighted the major problems, saying: ‘In July, world food prices jumped 10 per cent.

“Yet the thing we found more interesting than energy related bottlenecks was the disclosure toward the end of the report discussing the threat to the Japanese rice harvest: “In addition to the damage to energy infrastructure from the earthquake, the tsunami also impacted rice producing regions in Japan. While Japanese rice inventories are large, this puts the 2011/12 crop production at risk and may in turn drive Japanese rice imports higher, posing upside risk to current prices.” Granted, Japan is not a big exporter of rice, but it is a top 10 consumer. Should the country’s consumption (which is estimated at around 9 million metric tons) need to be satisfied by a surge in imports, and with the price of rice already dependent on the margin on speculative money, this could be the catalyst that send the grain, which has plunged in price over the past month, finally break beyond any potential manipulative price suppression schemes.

in 1993, when the LDP was briefly out of power, the government joined the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and has since allowed 770,000 tons of foreign rice to enter Japan every year, most of which is used as

animal feed,

re-exported as food aid,

or socked away in warehouses.

As a “countermeasure” the government pledged ¥6 trillion for rice-related matters, half of which would be spent on public works to provide jobs in farming areas.

Since ousting the LDP from power in 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan has maintained the status quo by subsidizing rice farmers who lose money, which seems to be quite a few of them. While output was down 4 percent in 2010, rice consumption was down 6.4 percent; and it is estimated that by June there will be 3.24 million tons of rice in storage, a 2.5 percent increase over 2010. Consumption will only decrease more, since the population is shrinking and dietary habits are changing.

And here is huffpost questioning the reliability of USA monitoring of import foodstuffs

Eighty Percent of Vitamin C Is Imported from China. Is it Safe?

Posted: 07/ 1/2011

Dara O`Rourke

[..]

And while food imports are rising by 10 percent per year and drug imports by 13 percent per year, Congress decided last month it was necessary to cut $285 million — about 12 percent — out of the Food and Drug Administration budget.

If enacted, these cuts will make it virtually impossible for the FDA to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011and to protect American consumers from growing food and drug hazards.

The dangers of an increasingly globalized supply chain for food and drugs are already visible: we see increased food safety problems; new contaminants entering food systems;

And this report looks at the general impact in north America but more importantly lists some of the processed foods that are circulating within NAFTA

The Impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on the U.S. Economy …

By United States International Trade Commission

[…]

Under NAFTA the market access provisions of the US Canada Free Trade Agreement continue to be in effect NAFTA did establish bilateral market access provisions between the United States and Mexico and contains trilateral provisions on domestic support export subsidies rules of origin safeguards and phytosanitary standards for these products 3 The change in specified performance indicators from 1 993 to 1 996 is due primarily to economic factors or industry developments occurring during the period other than NAFTA Any NAFTA impact on performance indicators is insignificant or a minor influence 4 This sector is represented by a diverse cross section of products including but not limited to dried pastas rice potatoes and other like dried products spices cider vinegar powdered sugar fried noodles sauce mixes beverage bases pectin pizza popcorn and syrups Imports from Mexico in this category are dominated by yeast seasonings and thickening agents Imports from Canada include beverage bases peanut butter and active yeasts 5 Products classified under HS 0904 pepper of the genus Piper genus Capsicum or genus Pimenta

consumer ready products is world wide US exports to Canada were dominated by beverage bases herb teas breakfast cereals and other miscellaneous prepared food items such as stuffed pasta pizza and quiche Other Factors Total US trade in miscellaneous food preparations grew by $658 million to $2.4 billion during 1993 96 Total US Canada trade in these products increased by $96 million to $570 million and total US Mexico trade in sector products rose by $10 million to $101 million There is little if any information on US investment in Mexico related to sector products However US multinational companies have had subsidiaries in Canada producing processed food products for sale in Canada and for export to the United States for many years before NAFTA

The Mexican government claims that its recently stepped-up commitment to environmental enforcement is sufficient to address the border problem.”We have … increased the number of inspectors in the border region to 200, a four-fold increase since 1989,” Ocaranza says. He also notes that Mexico has appropriated $460 million over three years to clean up the area along the U.S.-Mexican border, pointing out that a proportional fraction of U.S. Gross National Product would be $12 billion.

However, Lori Wallach, an attorney for the Washington, D.C.-based public interest group Public Citizen, estimates that the cost of a complete clean up is $5 billion, far more than the allocated $460 million. Williams says the border will only be cleaned up if NAFTA requires it, and perhaps even imposes a tax to fund the clean-up. “We are not happy that the administration has insisted that the border clean-up be independent of the trade agreement,” he says. “Even before the ink was dry [on the agreement], the House of Representatives cut 40 percent out of the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] budget to clean up the border. What’s going to happen three or four years from now?”

[…]

Citizen power

Linking together the concerns of NAFTA’s many critics is a fear that multinational corporations will use the agreement to usurp power from citizens and undercut their standard of living. For Lee, the issue comes down to who will make the decisions that guide the U.S. economy and ensure the health and safety of its citizens:

“I think the question really is, Can we take back control of the economy and manage the economy in some way to basically put a leash on the behavior of multinational corporations?'” she says.

“I think it’s possible and desirable to do so. The one thing we have to control is access to our market. If we tell multinational corporations they can’t sell here if they don’t respect basic principles, they’ll have no choice.”

The practise of mixing down contaminated food as a mitigating process relies on the science of the ICRP dose model. This model has serious flaws when used as a gauge of internal contamination and is more appropriate (if not very accurate in this writers opinion) in an environment such as you would find in a hospital. Not in the public arena.

And here is a list of European allowable limits in various foodstuffs presuming anyone is checking.

Radioactivity and Food

[…]

Dairy products Other

Isotopes of strontium (Sr-90) 125 750

Isotopes of iodine (I-31) 500 2.000

Alfa-emittinng isotopes of plutonium and

transplutonium (Pu-239 Am-241) 20 80

All other nuclides of half-life greater

than 10 days (Cs-134, Cs-137) 1.000 1.250

Baby Dairy Other Liquid

foods products foodstuffs Foodstuffs

Isotopes Strontium, Sr-90 75 125 750 125

Isotopes of iodine, I-131 150 500 2.000 500

Alpha-emitting isotopes

of plutonium and

transplutonium elements,

notably Pu-239, Am-241 1 20 80 20

All other nuclides of half-life

greater than 10 days,

notably Cs-134, Cs-137 400 1.000 1.250 1.000

[…]

Maximum permitted levels are set too high [20]

Green MEPs believe the maximum permitted levels of radioactive contamination are set far too high and would leave the European public exposed to unacceptably high doses of radioactive contamination. Strontium-90 is absorbed by bone, which leads to bone cancer and leukemia, caesium-137 spreads throughout the body but favours muscle tissue, plutonium is primarily toxic when inhaled and causes lung cancer and thyroid cancer broke among children in Chernobyl which drank milk which was iodine-131 contaminated.

Minor Foodstuffs [21]

For the minor foodstuffs given in the Annex of Regulation 944/89, the maximum permitted levels to be applied are 10 times those applicable to ‘other foodstuffs except minor foodstuffs’ fixed in the Regulation No 3954/87. Minor foodstuffs are those of minor dietary importance which make only a marginal contribution to food consumption by the population.

List of minor foodstuffs Garlic, truffels, capers (fresh, chilled, dried or as powder), manioc, arrowroot, salep, Jerusalem artichokes, sweet potatoes and similar roots and tubers with high starch or inulin content, fresh or dried, sago pith, peel of citrus fruit, curry and other spices, natural gums, agar-agar and other mucilages and thickeners, fats and oils and their fractions of fish or marine mammals, cocoa, yeasts baking powders, vitamins, essential oils.

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In particular, seafoods are a continuing problem. For an explanation of why radiation continues to enter the sea around Fukushima, and will continue to do so, you can listen to Arnie Gundersen’s latest assessment of teh Fukushima nuclear reactors at http://ifyoulovethisplanet.org/

i made the point when i answered that its odd that greenpeace didnt get the samples themselves so any contamination found might be mapped. such as the state of the sea mounds and sea canyons where the sealife is prelevant..

and i have to wonder if the samples they recieved were really from effected areas?

there is more to the greenpeace link than meets the eye.. seems like it is for japanese home consumption only.. not found in english yet?